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That Which Does Not Kill Us
Chapter 3
By Anne B. Walsh
Aletha Freeman-Black held her sobbing daughter on her lap with one arm. The other was around her kneeling son, who had his face pressed firmly against her robes in what Aletha suspected was an unsuccessful attempt to keep himself from bursting into tears.
"Hush, now," she whispered, kissing Meghan's head. "Hush, I'm here. Mama's here now. No need to cry."
Such a silly, normal thing to say. And how long ago was it that I thought I'd never say it again?
Tears threatened to take her over as well. Firmly, she slid them away. Not now. There's work. When this is over, or at least some part of it, then I can cry. Not in the middle of things.
Meghan sniffled hard and found a tremulous smile. "It was a good disguise, Mama Letha," she said, nuzzling against the shoulder Draco wasn't currently using. "I never would have guessed it was you."
"Obviously not." Aletha tightened her hug around both children for a moment, then slid Meghan to the ground and patted Draco's back briskly. "I assume you have someone down in the control room?"
"Neville and Ginny," Draco said in a voice that would have sounded normal to anyone who hadn't raised him. "Or possibly just Neville, if Ginny hasn't got away from the Healers yet."
"How did you know?" Meghan asked.
"Because I had to stun my estimable colleague when he noticed that the magical shields on the door we're supposed to be guarding had all gone down," Aletha said dryly.
Draco swore under his breath. "We have to hurry. If he's been found, if they've put them back up again…"
"They haven't." Aletha got to her feet and stretched her back. "I put up my own shield. Set specifically to block theirs, and to warn me if someone tried to reestablish it. And I have not been warned. So unless someone was powerful and skilled enough to get through my shield without tripping any of my guards, we haven't been found out yet."
"But we should still hurry." Meghan started for the door, then stopped. "Mama Letha?"
"How come you remember?" Meghan came back and took her mother's hand, as if reassuring herself of its reality. "I thought everybody but me forgot about the Pack."
Draco cleared his throat. "Er, over here? Tall blond thing?"
"I didn't know about you." Meghan made a face at her brother. "All Luq told me was that the only people who remembered were the ones who couldn't do anything about it."
"Well, strictly speaking, I'd fit the category." Aletha cast a Supersensory Charm out the door, found the hall clear, and waved the cubs past her towards the lounge. Once outside the room, she transferred the Zoned Silencer and followed them.
Draco had already pushed aside the unconscious figure of her fellow Healer by the time she arrived, and he and Meghan were investigating the various locks on the door. "How's that?" he asked over his shoulder. "You're adult, you're a Healer, respectable…"
Aletha chuckled. "Draco, I'm supposed to be dead."
"Oh." Draco regarded a bolt for a moment, tapped it with his wand, then slid it slowly back. "Yes, that would make it harder."
"But Luq wasn't taking any chances." Aletha took up a place beside the door, watching with half her attention lest one of the cubs start to make a grave mistake. "He tried to alter my memories. To make me think I'd faked my own death, given up my daughter for adoption, and spent my life wandering."
Meghan humphed indignantly. "It better not have worked!"
Draco snickered, and she swatted him with the back of her hand. "Stop it. It isn't funny." She turned away to look at Aletha, her silver eyes bright and wondering. "Why didn't it work, Mama Letha?"
"I don't know." Aletha touched the spot on her breastbone where pendants usually hung. "I think… maybe because I've had experience. But I can't be sure." She shook her head, driving the memory away. "I woke up afterwards with the two lives in my mind, but where the one he'd given me was supposed to be strong and our Pack-life like a dream, unreal and faded, they were reversed. I knew something wasn't right. And then I found out what had happened to Harry, and I knew I had to get into St. Mungo's if I possibly could."
"So you disguised yourself?" Draco said, setting aside another padlock. "How did you get assigned to this floor?"
"I'm not, usually." Aletha touched Meghan's arm, halting a poorly performed spell. "But someone Flooed off tonight, and they brought me in. A touch of good fortune, to offset all this bad. Slower on the back-and-forth, love, then quickly around once… yes, that's it."
"Good fortune." Draco sat back on his heels. "I wonder."
"If we have an enemy in high places… do we also have a friend?"
Draco hurried down the hall, the chill calm which had shattered in Letha's arms sliding back around him now that he was so close. Meghan hadn't known much about what the so-called researchers had done to Luna, but what she had known, and what Letha had been able to learn in her surreptitious searches, did not fill him with confidence.
Just let her be alive, he prayed to whoever might be listening. Let her be alive, and still sane—as sane as she ever was—and I can deal with anything else.
A left turn, then a right, and he was there. Three raps on the top and bottom of the doorknob with his wand's edge, five quick swirls around it, and it turned in his hand. He stepped into the room, keeping his eyes on the far wall, and shut the door behind himself deliberately before looking back around.
A small table, a wooden chair, and a hospital bed constituted the only furniture in sight. The bed's occupant was sitting up, her dark blonde hair spilling over her nightgowned shoulders and the white sheet covering her from the waist down. Wide gray eyes examined him from top to toe, then the other way around.
"It won't work," Luna said, her voice soft but penetrating. "You've tried this once already."
"Tried what? Luna, it's me, I'm here to get you out—"
"Don't come any closer." Luna's tone rocked Draco back on his heels. Her eyes had gone in an instant from wondering to the icy anger he knew so well himself. "You touch me enough during the day. Leave me alone at night. And looking like him? How dare you."
Draco lifted one eyebrow. "Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me what this person you've mistaken me for usually looks like," he said calmly. "Once I've located him, we can spend some time finding the portions of himself he values most and removing them. Slowly. One at a time. Perhaps we'll ask Meghan to heal him in between, to make sure he doesn't die too soon."
Luna blinked several times, then snapped her gaze down to the bed. "I don't know anyone named Meghan," she said in a monotone. "And I don't like you. You're mean to me. Go away."
"Luna." Draco risked a few steps closer to the bed. "Don't let them do this to you."
"No one has done anything to me except show me the truth," Luna recited tonelessly. "I am not a Seer, just a deluded little girl. If I were kidnapped, no one would come to find me. If I were rescued, it would be by accident."
"Luna, look at me," Draco coaxed, moving closer with every word. "Look at me… you know that isn't true…"
"No one really thinks about me as a friend," Luna went on as though she hadn't heard. "They only let me come along because they have no way to get rid of me, and because sometimes I am useful. I understand that now."
Torture is not nearly enough to repay this. Draco went to one knee beside the bed. "Luna," he said, waving a hand between her eyes and the spot on the bedclothes she seemed so fascinated by. "Look at me."
"I don't want to." Luna kept her head where it was.
"Because I don't want to see you and not See you."
The emphasis laid on the second word made Draco sure of her meaning. "Is it your Sight? Have they done something to it? Luna, if it's not working right, if you're Seeing too much again—"
"Too much?" Luna laughed bitterly. "You didn't worry so much about that last month. Or the month before. You tried to make me See too much. You wanted it. 'Maybe it'll break her down some, if she can't control it,' you said. But you found out I'm not so easy to destroy. So you tried to do the opposite. You tried to take it away from me. And now…" A small sob forced its way past her lips. "Now you have."
"Take it away?" Fear settled into Draco's chest, but in the back of his mind, one ray of hope still glimmered. "Luna—how do you know?"
"Because," Luna whispered. "When I look at you, all I can see is him."
The ray brightened, grew stronger. "Look again." Draco laid his hand under Luna's chin and lifted it as gently as a new-hatched chick. "Look the way you did two nights before Christmas, a long time ago."
Luna looked, and her eyes grew wider than ever. Her hand came up, tracing pricked ears in the air above Draco's head, whiskers to each side of his face. "They told me you were dead," she breathed.
"They told me the same thing." Draco slid his hand along the line of Luna's jaw until he found her hair. "Funny how wrong they can be."
"Funny." Luna closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and let a true smile blossom slowly across her face. "Yes. I suppose it is."
Draco leaned forward and pressed his lips to the bare hollow of her throat. "I suppose you're right," he whispered against her skin. "You usually are."
A ragged gasp was his only answer. Then, silence.
"Hermione?" Ron looked up from the manual he was studying at the kitchen table. "What's going—mmmph!"
"I don't know," Hermione whispered breathlessly when she freed her lips from his. "But I need you right now."